I’m glad to hear it. It was my fire.
19
Mother was not just outrageously ugly. She was outrageously kind-hearted too. Her eyes were always a little watery, a bit moist, perhaps because of the slight bulge. There was something wrong with her thyroid, and those moist eyes softened her view of the world. Father beat and scolded, Mother only had to look at Henk and me to make things better again. She looked at us a lot.
Henk was Father’s boy; I was not Mother’s boy. She didn’t differentiate, although I did notice that, during the period when Riet joined us at the table, she looked at me more often than she looked at Henk. It wasn’t a look of consolation, it was a look of encouragement, like a hand on my back to push me forward. Mother got along perfectly well with Riet, but her presence also placed Mother in a dilemma: through no fault of her own, her boys were no longer equal. Father had no such scruples, he had taken sides long before.
When she died (not from an overactive thyroid, but from a heart attack), Father could no longer make his spoon jump in his coffee cup the way Henk had as well. After all, there was no one there to answer the call. I was there, of course, but he wasn’t reckless enough to provoke me like that. We just stopped drinking coffee, or we drank coffee separately. Ada hadn’t moved in next door yet, she never knew Mother.
She had the heart attack in the shower. That means it was a Saturday. I wasn’t at home and it wouldn’t have occurred to Father to go and check, despite her staying in the bathroom much longer than usual. Some people have a heart attack and just keep on going, some people collapse and never get up again. Mother never got up again.
I never blamed her for not speaking up the day Father sent Riet away and told me I was done “there in Amsterdam.” What if, instead of crying, she had said something to protect me from spending my life milking cows? Would I have seized the opportunity? I don’t think so. I was nineteen, I was already a man. I could have stuck up for myself. I didn’t, I stayed as silent as Mother. Long after Riet had disappeared behind the window frame (by then she was sure to be up on the dyke and I’d had plenty of time to commit to memory a place where I might find a nest of peewit’s eggs), I turned around. To the left of Father’s back I saw her half-emptied plate, the cutlery placed neatly on either side. To the right of Father’s back sat Mother, looking at me even more moistly than usual. At that moment an alliance was sealed. I couldn’t say exactly what that alliance involved, but it definitely included some we’ll-get-through-this-together. I sat back down at the table and we finished the meal in silence. The next morning Father and I milked the cows together. After the milking I put my textbooks in a cardboard box and put the box in Henk’s built-in wardrobe. Weeks later a letter from my tutor arrived, asking where I was and whether I was planning on coming back. I put the unanswered letter in with the books. I’ve ignored the cardboard box ever since.
The alliance held until her death. It was an alliance of glances, not words. Mother and I looked at each other when he disappeared into the bedroom after calling her a romantic soul; when he growled while cutting the gristle off a piece of braised steak; when he raged across the fields while moving the yearlings or sheep from one field to another; when he went to bed at ten o’clock on New Year’s Eve; when he barked the day’s jobs at me (as if I was a fifteen-year-old kid and not a forty-year-old man); when he said “I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole” in discussions about anything at all, before going to sit in his chair in the living room like a lump of rock.
On very rare occasions she avoided looking at me, and that was almost always after Father had asked if it wasn’t time for me to start looking for a wife. I took that to mean that for once she agreed with him.
After her death I didn’t have anyone left to look at, to look with — that was the worst of it. The alliance had been unilaterally dissolved. I found it — and find it — very difficult to look Father straight in the eye. In Mother’s eyes I always saw Henk’s shadow and I assumed that she saw the same in mine. (Of course, she also saw Henk in my body as a whole, in my eyes she saw him double.) Father’s eyes never gave away anything — after Mother’s death even her shadow was absent.
20
For Riet I make an exception: I drive south. South-west, to be precise. To the ferry in North Amsterdam. We have agreed on a time and long before that time I am already parked in front of a chip stand on the IJ. Futuristic ferries cross back and forth, streamlined butter dishes in blue and white, nothing like the pale-green boats they had in 1967. Back then they still took cars, the ferries were sailing motorways. I see “Municipal Ferry No. 15” before me, and the narrow, roofed sections for bikes and motorbikes. They were only pale green inside the deck, the outside was a filthy white. I’d forgotten that.
I try to think my way further into the city. Faces and names of fellow students don’t come back and I can’t even picture the building I had lectures in. It’s all gone, there across the water.
I described the Opel Kadett to her, but, faced with the stream of pedestrians and cyclists, I start to worry. Who will discover who? Should I stay in the car or get out and stand next to it?
Earlier this morning, when I was in the middle of the yard with Father in my arms and he asked me through chattering teeth and trembling lips where I was taking him, I decided to carry him back to his bedroom. I was going to put him in the loft of the yearling shed. His question and the inquisitive looks from the donkeys (one of the two started to bray loudly, waking the chickens from their morning snooze) were enough to make me abandon the plan. How was I going to get him up the ladder anyway? The return journey went smoothly, all the doors were wide open. I put him back in bed (still warm) and was going to leave the room without a word. At the door I changed my mind.
“I’m going to pick up Riet,” I said.
He looked at me with a blank expression.
“At the ferry in Amsterdam. She’s coming to visit.”
“Riet?” The name croaked out and he went a bit pale.
“Yes, Riet. And you’re dead.”
“Dead?”
“I told her you’re dead.”
“Why?”
Now I tried to look at him blankly. “Do you need to ask?”
He thought about it.
“If I were you, I’d keep quiet,” I said ominously. “Otherwise there’s a chance she’ll come upstairs.”
“What for?”
“Payback.”
“Oh. .”
“And you’re not all there, remember?”
“Oh. .”
“I’m going now.”
Que será, será, as Doris Day would say, I thought on the stairs. Whatever will be, will be.
I’m old, I thought in the scullery.
A ferry arrives every six minutes: five since I’ve been parked here. A lot of women in their fifties have got off them, fortunately I can exclude the ones with bikes. They’re all wearing thick coats and scarves. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a winter like this: the temperature has fallen below zero again and there is even snow on the ground. The sixth ferry approaches the quayside. I check my watch; this will be the ferry that brings her to me. Where are all these people going on an ordinary weekday? Riet is one of the last to get off the ferry. I feel a little dizzy, I was expecting someone who looks like Ada (why that should be, I don’t know), but it is Riet just as she rode away thirty years ago. Without the long blonde hair, a little plumper, and with a different way of walking. I sit rigid behind the steering wheel, which I have involuntarily grabbed with both hands. She walks straight up to the car. I feel like falling to one side, crawling under the dashboard, putting the car in reverse and disappearing backwards into the IJ, straight through the chip stand if necessary. Maybe she’ll try to save me.